JForce Dual-plug Flash Drive for Android Smartphones & Tablets

USB OTG never quite caught up in the mobile market. This is about to change with an increasing number of Android tablets and smartphones whose micro-USB welcomes a wide variety of generic peripherals. Followed by Sanwa, JForce is among one of the Japanese companies to tap into this market. Here’s a USB 2.0 flash drive from JForce with a type-A connector one end and a micro-USB on the other. As you can imagine, the JF-UFDP4S thumbdrive’s dual plug design is made for mobile devices.

A quick check on JForce website reveals drive’s power consumption to top at 250mA. This is about right as you don’t want phone’s battery draining out due to file transfers. 4GB of capacity also seems somewhat lacking when most phones now exceed 16GB. However, keep in mind that the JForce can only manage to copy 50MB/s every 20s. But this seems to be a cap imposed by the USB OTG host controllers on the phones. Lastly, despite JForce’s USB OTG support, the JF-UFDP4S supported list only includes a mere 10 Android devices, including but not limited to Samsung Galaxy S3 and Sony Xperia-series. For a $24 (1980 yen) flash drive, it’s a decent solution for intermediate storage (for small files) on the go.